SLEEPING BEAUTIES OR LAUGHING MEDUSAS: MYTH AND FAIRY TALE IN THE WORK OF ANGELA CARTER, A. S. BYATT AND MARINA WARNER Haifaa Al-Hadi A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Newcastle University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics October 2010 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the use of myth and fairy tale in Angela Carter‘s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Nights at the Circus (1984), A. S. Byatt‘s Possession (1990) and Morpho Eugenia (1992) and Marina Warner‘s Indigo (1992) and The Leto Bundle (2001). I argue that these authors rewrite well-known traditional myths and fairy tales in order to demythologize social myths concerning women. The first chapter investigates Carter‘s revisions of traditional myth and fairy tale narratives, revisions which advocate new possibilities for male-female relationships. It offers a Cixousian reading of the journeys of transformation which Carter‘s male and female protagonists undergo. This chapter also highlights the affinities between Hélène Cixous‘s and Carter‘s approaches to myth and fairy tale and their belief in the liberating potential of revising traditional narratives. The second chapter explores how the use of traditional myth and fairy tale narratives in Byatt‘s novels is centered on the figure of the female artist/writer trapped by cultural myths of female inferiority and passivity. I argue that Byatt‘s novels counter these myths by celebrating female sexuality and highlight female creative potential. This reading of Byatt‘s novels is largely informed by Cixous‘s idea of bisexuality, and her subversive reading of the Medusa. The third chapter discusses Warner‘s employment of traditional narratives of myth and fairy tale in order to revise naturalized cultural myths of romantic love and maternal love. I argue that the novels reveal women‘s entrapment within these social myths, particularly by giving prominence to the voice of previously marginalized, and often victimized or monsterized, female figures. Here I draw on Cixous‘s work on the hysteric and the monstrous female. The thesis suggests that Carter, Byatt and Warner are engaged in 1 two strategies with regards to traditional myths and fairy tales: the first is a celebratory one, manifested in their revival of powerful mythic female figures which stress female ability and glorify assertive female sexuality; and the second is a revisionist one, aimed at exposing women‘s entanglement within the cultural narratives of femininity. 2 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One 30 Angela Carter: Revision and Vision Chapter Two 94 A.S. Byatt: The Female Artist between the Glass Coffin and the Abyss Chapter Three 155 Marina Warner: Rewriting the ‗Herstory‘ of Love and Motherhood Conclusion 218 Bibliography 224 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I first would like to thank the Syrian Ministry of Higher Education, and Damascus University for sponsoring this project. My thanks and gratitude go to my supervisors Dr Stacy Gillis and Dr Matthew Grenby for their help and support. Their valuable guidance, amiable and strict, has made this project achievable. I am also grateful to Professor Kim Reynolds for providing advice and encouragement when I needed them most. My thanks go to the staff in the HASS Graduate School for their enthusiastic willingness to help. I also owe thanks to my internal supervisor at Damascus University, Dr Nayef Al-Yasin, for his support in my time of need. Thank you to my friend Ayah Durkawi for years of friendship and joint bitter-sweet memories. I am forever indebted to my dear parents, Anam Amer and Mashari Al- hadi, for believing in me and making me believe in myself. Thank you mother for worrying with me over every obstacle and celebrating every achievement. Many thanks to my lovely brothers, Alaa, Fedaa, Motaz, Ashraf and Muhannad for prayers, jokes and poems, for putting up with my continuous whining and always succeeding in putting a smile on my face. This thesis would not have been written without the boundless love, endless patience, and continual support of my dear husband Nathem Haidar, to whom I present a whole-hearted thank you. Without his being there for me every step of the way, I would have never been able to make it through the ups and downs of years of work on this project. Last, but in no means least, thanks to my little Taj for filling my life with joy and laughter. This thesis is dedicated to both my father who has motivated me to pursue this dream, and my husband who has helped me make my dream come true. 4 INTRODUCTION This thesis examines the use of myth and fairy tale in Angela Carter‘s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Nights at the Circus (1984), A. S. Byatt‘s Possession (1990) and Morpho Eugenia (1992) and Marina Warner‘s Indigo (1992) and The Leto Bundle (2001). Bringing these three authors together for the first time, I present Carter as a source of influence on both Byatt‘s and Warner‘s work, especially in their revisions of old tales. The thesis aims to show that these novelists share a project of employing retellings of traditional myths and fairy tales to demythologize social myths concerning women. It offers new readings of some widely studied novels by these authors, and also focuses on novels that have received less critical attention, viewing them as part of the project of demythologization. I am less concerned with the history or the different versions of myths and fairy tales revisited by these authors, than with the significance of the twists they introduce to traditional narratives, and the way they use them to comment on social conditions trying to expose culturally constructed images of femininity and masculinity. Before introducing my project in more detail, it will be necessary to explore various definitions of myth and fairy tale, and chart different feminist approaches to the genre. Although many critics and folklorists have spared no effort in their endeavour to reach a clear and comprehensive definition, the complex nature of myth and its ability to resist confinement has made, and still makes, their task a very difficult one. William Righter, in Myth and Literature, affirms that ‗most definitions‘ of myth ‗exist at a very high level of generality, and an admission of the 5 multiple nature of the subject is built into them‘.1 This broadness is exemplified by a number of attempted definitions. Whereas René Wellek, for instance, see myth as an anonymous, irrational narrative, ‗the explanation a society offers its young of why the world is and why we do as we do‘, Allan Watts believes that ‗myth is to be defined as a complex of stories – some no doubt fact, and some fantasy – which … human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe of human life‘.2 Although both definitions relate myth to the essential questions man asks about himself and the universe, in Watts‘s definition myth is not dismissed as irrational. He stresses that there is a factual element within its fantastic framework. The blurred boundaries between myth, legend, fairy tale, folktale, fable, and other similar genres often make absolute definitions disputable, if not contradictory.3 Michael Bell goes beyond one-dimensional definitions of myth when he comments on the fluctuating meaning of the term: ‗The word ―myth‖ inhabits a twilight zone between literature, philosophy and anthropology. It means both a supremely significant foundational story and a falsehood. We therefore use it relationally; one person‘s belief is another‘s myth‘.4 This ambivalent attitude towards myth and fairy tale is another characteristic of the debate. Laurence Coupe refers to this doubtful attitude towards the word myth in cultural and literary studies as he maintains it is often ‗being used to imply some sort of illusion‘.5 Coupe explains that ‗in literary and cultural studies ―myth‖ is frequently used as synonymous with ―ideology‖, as in 1 William Righter, Myth and Literature (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 5. 2 Quoted in Righter, Myth and Literature, p. 5. Righter gives a very detailed explanation of the theories of myth. 3 One example of this argument can be found in the essays collected in Myth and the Modern Imagination, ed. by Margaret Dalziel (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1967). This book reveals the various points of contention over the overlapping elements between myth and legend and other similar genres manifested in the contributing scholars‘ attempts to reach a definition of myth. 4 Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. 5 Laurence Coupe, Myth (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 1. 6 ―the myth of progress‖ or ―the myth of the free individual‖. In entertainment it is frequently used as synonymous with ―fantasy‖‘.6 When used in this sense, myth becomes also interchangeable with fairy tales, as when Lorna Sage says: ‗Using the term ―fairy tale‖ in its colloquial sense: a sugar-coated lie; or more grandly, a ―myth‖, a cultural construct naturalized as a timeless truth‘.7 Coupe objects to this view of myth, stating: ‗While it is true that there is some overlap between myth and ideology, and between myth and fantasy, it is not helpful to use them interchangeably‘, for, as he aims to show in his book, ‗there is a lot more to myth than deception or distraction‘.8 I will return to these divided views of myths as conveyers of eternal truth or as perpetuators of social ideologies later in my discussion. The attempt to give a specific definition of fairy tales also divides scholars of the genre.